Dennis Barden’s significant essay, “Your Next Few Leaders,” describes how the leadership pipeline in academe has become leaky at best. As he notes, the traditional path to the presidency through the academic ranks has become increasingly ill-serving and even intimidating for promising leaders. The pressures of academic leadership, from the level of department chair and up, often drive people screaming from those offices.

Likewise, the political and financial demands of the modern presidency are maddening. At my institution, the president must raise the equivalent of a faculty member’s salary every two days to maintain our baseline budgeting levels. At some research universities, presidents must raise salaries of entire departments each week. And don’t forget the complications of dealing with state legislatures or...

In our discussions here about academe’s use of adjunct faculty members, one issue that has arisen several times is the notion that full-time faculty members can — and should — provide much more support for students beyond the classroom than can be fairly asked of adjuncts. Since such support is demonstrably effective in promoting student success and retention, it’s worth considering how the high use of adjuncts affects retention and graduation rates.

Student-retention rates are affected by many, many institutional factors. For example, there is a fairly direct correlation between incoming students’ academic credentials and their first-to-second-year retention rates, which explains, in part, why the most selective institutions tend to have the highest retention. It could also be argued that such institutions have the highest-quality academic programs, and that, as they tend to be rich,...

We are in the last-minute search season, where all kinds of frantic interviews and offers are being made. That means there are plenty of raw emotions on the market, especially for folks who are desperately trying to land something to pay the bills. It’s hard to keep body and soul together, and the stakes are high indeed.

There’s a Garth Brooks song, “Thank God for Unanswered Prayers” about the “one that got away” — the relationship that produced tears for a moment but in hindsight was a huge bullet that was dodged. I thought about it recently when a former student had e-mailed me to lament over a job she didn’t get, only to end up with a much better offer just a couple of weeks later. When you’re on the job market, it’s so easy to get focused on getting one particular position, or any position, that we lose touch with the realities of the job itself. When I was a broke, starving ABD, ...

The session presentation was titled “Optimizing the Use of Part-Time Faculty.” Titles like that make me queasy, because “optimizing” people generally goes well for those doing the optimizing, and badly for those being optimized. I spent Memorial Day weekend at a conference of the National Institute for Staff and Organizational Development, in Austin, Texas. It’s the first time I’ve attended (well, exhibited at, actually) that conference, and I can tell you that few disciplinary meetings offer the quality of the sessions at NISOD.

Jim Hammons, a professor and program coordinator in the Higher Education Leadership Program at the University of Arkansas, led the session on optimizing part-time faculty members. Unlike the sparsely attended sessions on part timers that are held at other big conferences, Hammons’s room was jammed with program directors, department chairs, deans, provosts,...

I try not to be pessimistic, but the realist in me says that if this year has been difficult budgetwise for most institutions, just wait until next year. Tax revenues for states will continue to decline, donations will continue to wane, and endowment returns will get even worse since many institutions use a three-year rolling average for their disbursements.

I see more budget cuts on the horizon. Anyone who has had to deal with deep cuts knows how frustrating it is when the process works in one direction only: top down. Most folks in the trenches feel that a more team-oriented approach might be more effective.

What advice would you offer to administrators who must make more cuts next year?

In my last post here, I talked generally about how adjuncts are employed and about the potential effects of their use and abuse on educational quality. I’m grateful for the responses to that post, which take up a number of important issues, including budgetary concerns, exploitation of adjunct labor, and some suggestions that colleges and universities might more wisely employ their budgets to increase the percentage of full-time faculty members (whether tenure track or not).

I’ve done a little math on my own budget that I want to share to show the dilemmas facing my small university with regard to adjunct employment. For context, we have about 1,000 students on the campus and another 2,000 in professional and online programs in 14 locations around the state. For now, I am only discussing our operations on our home campus.

First, some figures. Our total annual university budget is...

On April 27th, The New York Times published an essay that compared graduate education in the United States to the current wet, hot mess that is the Detroit automobile industry. That heresy did not go unanswered by academics, who have long argued that the problem is not the overproduction of Ph.D.‘s, but rather an “underproduction” of tenure-track jobs. One academic writer referred to the Times essay as “junk analysis.”

Some academics have difficulty correctly identifying junk analysis, too. The 1989 Bowen report, “Prospect for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences,” comes to mind. In that widely referenced report, William G. Bowen predicted “a substantial excess demand for faculty in the arts and sciences.” But the report was flawed; it had failed to account for the 350,000 part-time faculty members then working in academe. It wasn’t until 1994 that Bowen’s conclusions and methodology were...

I have been chair of two English departments, one of which had six full-time faculty members and the other had more than 20. Since then, I’ve been dean and vice president for academic affairs at universities with small departments (no larger than nine), and, thus, have had the occasion to think extensively about the challenges they face in hiring.

Defining faculty qualifications is a special kind of challenge in small departments. They generally are involved in an internal tug-of-war between specialization and generalism, and it’s beyond doubt that most recent Ph.D.‘s are extremely specialized. While a department may need a broad range of coverage, most candidates right out of graduate school will be comfortable only in a narrow slice of that range.

The strongest candidates, then, usually are the ones who appear temperamentally inclined toward exploration across a discipline, and...

A colleague in another state, “Jane,” told me this story a while ago: She received an offer and a contract for a new position at another university during exam week at her current institution. Her “old” job had not yet extended her contract (that typically happened at the start of the fall semester), so she would not break an agreement by leaving. As she notified her dean that she would be moving in the next few weeks, he was clearly upset.

Staring at his desktop, he said, “I hope you know what this will do to your colleagues. Because of the current budget and hiring freezes the board has instituted, we will not be able to replace you next year. This means that your colleagues will have to teach overloads to cover your courses. This is very unfair of you. I hope you have thought this through very carefully. It’s going to be hard not to think of you as a traitor, to some extent. If I...

A recent post on a blog called Reassigned Time is an excellent example of why it’s worth it for anyone interested in the future of higher education to keep an eye on blogs that comment on higher education.

The post, ‘Changing’ Higher Education — Dr. Crazy’s View, takes up a variety of perennial issues that are particularly pressing these days, including the exploitation of adjunct labor (with its attendant damage to the academic job market), the pressures from trustees and legislatures that sometimes greatly distort institutions’ academic missions, and the turf wars that so often afflict departmental and institutional operations.

All of those are important concerns, and the post makes a number of salient points. What I want to add is that the academy is made up of people, and that concerted action can change institutions for the better, even in the face of adverse economic...